It’s now been six decades since Ford launched the Mustang at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, at a stroke creating the ‘pony car’. This more compact twist on the muscle car racked up 418,000 sales in its first year alone and went on to star in everything from Bond films to Bullitt, starring Steve McQueen.
It is one of the few nameplates to have been in continuous production ever since and has now outlived the Dodge Challenger and Chevrolet Camaro rivals it spawned – ‘you can’t make cars like this in the EV era,’ announced Chevy and Dodge; ‘hold our beer’, replied Ford.
Just into its seventh generation, this new Mustang remains astonishingly faithful to the original recipe – the design and details could be nothing else, and the Mustang is still rear-wheel drive and offered with a choice of manual or automatic gearboxes, coupe or convertible bodies. Even a Porsche 911 has evolved more.
1964 Worlds Fair Ford Exhibit
Crucially, a big-hearted 5.0-litre V8 – dubbed ‘Coyote’ – still rumbles and pulses under the Mustang’s bonnet. As distinctive as a Texan twang, it is one of the few remaining engines worldwide not to turn to either hybrid technology or turbochargers as a replacement for displacement.
What is new this generation are whizzy twin touchscreens powered by Unreal Engine gaming software that let you do everything from connect to Apple CarPlay to tweak how your Mustang drives and sounds. There’s also a new variant named Dark Horse, which is currently the range-topper, offered only as a coupe and officially billed as next best thing to Ford’s Mustang GT3 racecars.
Ford Mustang Dark Horse
Visual tell-tales versus the base Mustang are pretty subtle (most obvious are a Zorro-like band of black running between the LED headlights, a fresh rear spoiler and different design of 19-inch alloys), and there’s only a negligible performance hike of 6bhp, albeit to a still-very-healthy 446bhp.
Performance halos usually have more differentiation than this, but props where they’re due because Ford have gone large on beefier engineering so the Dark Horse can keep pounding laps on a track day. There’s a tougher manual gearbox, extra engine and transmission cooling – largely invisible stuff that’s so easily cost-cut.
If it sounds and is a muscular thing to hustle, the Dark Horse proves a surprisingly easy companion as I burble through Cagnes-Sur-Mer during the early morning rush. The driver’s seat is comfortable, I twirl the modestly weighted steering as nonchalantly as McQueen, and there’s buttery smooth clutch take-up on this six-speed manual.
Mostly the ride’s supple too thanks to standard ‘MagneRide’ suspension with pothole mitigation (a sixth sense that basically stiffens the shocks to stop a wheel fully plummeting into road craters).
Like the previous model launched in 2015, the new one’s also available in right-hand drive, but this time the development team have lavished extra effort making it work on the unique challenges of European roads. And few European roads represent more of a challenge than the Route Napoleon, which climbs, flicks and plunges through the Alpes Maritimes to put performance and dynamics under the microscope like little else.
Never mind the (pretty lazy) original Ford Mustang, the 2015 model would quickly come undone up here, but this new sportier ’Stang strings these epic bends together with real fluency. Faster steering and a more rigid connection to the front axle is key to its new-found energy and precision, properly waking the Mustang up and making this 1.8-tonne two-metre-wide car feel fleeter than it is. It’s surprisingly agile for a car so big.
Even if there’s little in the way of road-surface texture flowing up through the steering wheel itself, it takes just a few corners to sense the improved grip and composure on offer here. It’s a car to grab by the scruff and lean on hard through corners, confident that the suspension can keep the body in check, and to brake late, trusting in its huge Brembo brakes – even on the long downhill sections with coils of hairpins that make the Route Napoleon such a challenge. This is a much more sophisticated chassis than before.
What you might still crave is a little more power. UK-bound Mustangs are roughly 10 percent less punchy and not quite as noisy as US models (blame European regulations) but even so the V8 is an invigorating thing to wring out. There’s not the mid-range juice we’ve become so used to with smaller turbocharged engines, and on some long full-throttle climbs uphill it can feel a little breathless, but the payback is instant response and real fizz when you wind the revs round the dial to a hedonistic 7,250rpm.
Plus, because there’s a surplus of grip to power, the Mustang encourages you to roll up your sleeves and maximise the oomph that is available– and the more I work this car, the more I connect with it.
There are few options when it comes to the generously equipped Dark Horse, and only two materially affect the driving experience: the seats and the gearbox, with the latter most crucial. The 10-speed auto is perfectly serviceable and easier around town, but if you’re going old-school with a V8 Mustang, it’s surely perverse not to spec the (same price) manual gearbox, especially with its pleasingly physical shift action and tight gate. (Clever rev matching tech blips the throttle for you too, smoothing down shifts and trumpeting heroic noises from the exhaust).
Add in the optional Recaro seats – comfortable, tactile, figure-hugging… some of the best I’ve ever sat in – and this is one properly sorted sports car.
But we need to talk money, because the Dark Horse starts from £67,995, putting it a little beyond even the excellent new BMW M2 with its fine European breeding. True, they’re quite different takes on a similar recipe, but the Dark Horse’s more direct rival actually comes from within Ford’s own stable. The Mustang GT costs a chunk less at £55,725, is down only 6bhp, looks much the same and actually has the sweeter manual gear shift.
The Dark Horse chassis does feel a tad sharper, its shorter gearing helps pep up performance and the name just sounds cool, but the differences between the two are probably more nuanced than they should be. If you couldn’t care less about track days and want the ultimate bang-for- your-buck, get the GT. Whichever Mustang you choose, though, no-one but Ford makes ’em like this anymore.
More details at Mustang.
